"Illiteracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the charges of musical ignorance, illiteracy, musical-"ghost"-employment, and other imposture, under which he suffered in this country nearly all his life. Jullien indignantly denied the hard impeachment, and declared that he began his musical life as a fifer in the French navy, and had in that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the population decreased in density, but it increased in heterogeneity and non-English elements, and in illiteracy. The South had also the stronger aristocratic feeling. Slaves, as the above figures show, were far more numerous in that section. Their condition was ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... information. Somehow if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell, and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though, instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... a considerable part of the Irish electorate falsely declared themselves to be illiterate, so that the secrecy of the ballot might be avoided and their votes might be regulated by the clergy. On a comparison of the statistics of illiterate voters and the Census of illiteracy a similar proportion was found to exist as that between the total number of voters and the whole population, in this ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... on the 24th of March. Mr. Johnson did not live to resume his seat. On the last day of the ensuing July (1875) he died peacefully at his home in East Tennessee among friends who had watched his progress from poverty and illiteracy to the highest position in the Republic. He was in the sixty-seventh ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the committee also suggests the heroic element in our work. It brings to mind the obstacles and difficulties which we are called upon to overcome. The illiteracy of the colored people is a fact immense in extent and dark in its prophetic significance. Your hearts were rejoiced, I know, by the statements of the changes going on in the education of the colored children in several States ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 3, March 1888 • Various
... Indeed, it is impossible that the two men should be really sympathetic with each other. With all his faults, Mr. Balfour does represent the literary and cultured side of political life; while Mr. Chamberlain is illiteracy embodied. Then, Mr. Chamberlain has a knack of attributing every victory to himself—modesty isn't one of his many virtues—and this cannot be particularly agreeable to the real leader of the Opposition. There is thus a constant competition between the two men ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... prepared to supply him with one or two rare and special examples myself. I possess tributes to the English effort written by Portuguese, Japanese and Belgians; and paeans by Englishmen which excel, as regards both simplicity of sentiment and illiteracy of construction, any foreign composition. Birmingham is not noted for very many things. It is, we know, the only large city in the country which remains solidly Tory in election after election. It ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... seven jokes—brother to that of the mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage—a stock character. His illiteracy is classic; his ignorant sayings irresistable. He was sired by Charles Keene and damned by Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious humourist employs him periodically. These two ideas of the book business are ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... can go into the woods for firewood. The women hang forever over the stove or the washtub, go into the stages to split the fish, or into the gardens to grow "'taties." Yet oddly enough, there is less illiteracy among the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... Russia has been the beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words after him with the fervor of people going through a religious mystery. Unspeakable faith ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... that Viscount Harberton sees a chance for his own order in the circumstance that, while the poor man's child is driven to school by the inspector, the rich man can 'boot the spy out,' and so confer on his children the priceless boon of complete illiteracy. Shall we live to see a House of Lords ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... feller. I'm just beginning to guess I do. He's a heart as big as a house, and the manner to scare a 'hold-up.' He's the grit of a reg'ment of soldiers and the mutton softness of a kid girl. He's the brain of a Solomon, and the illiteracy of a one day school kid. He's all those things, and he's the biggest proposition in men I've ever heard tell about. It's kind of tough. Don't you feel that way? He'll suck a pint of tobacco juice in the day, ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Abraham Lincoln went with his pioneer father to settle in wild Indiana, the chief diversion of the rude inhabitants was from the preaching of the traveling pastors. They were singular devotees whose sincerity redeemed all their flaws of ignorance, illiteracy, and violence. Abraham, with his inherent proneness toward imitation of oratory, used to "take them off" to the hilarity of the laboring men who formed his first audiences. Out of his recollections came this tale, which ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Morley had explained, striving to hide the depths of his illiteracy; "my eyes don' gone back on me. I reckon I better go down to The Forge and get specs, but jes' now I'd like to have light on this ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... demagogues who were endeavoring to mislead the people, and reviewed with sympathy the great progress that had been made since the war. He pleads guilty to the charge of having new light and is glad of it. He points out with keen insight the illiteracy of the masses of the Southern people and the lack of educational facilities. A movement for the development of a public school system in the South was led by J. L. M. Curry, a Confederate soldier of Georgia stock. He became an evangelist in the crusade for ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Russian in Lithuania, Magyar in Slovakia and at the same time to prohibit the publication of books and newspapers in the mother-tongue of the country has been, in the first place, to create an artificial illiteracy and, in the second, to create in the minds of native peoples a sense of social and intellectual inferiority to the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... immediate servant of a rich man, as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller. It is as false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write. There is an element of Capitalism in all modern countries, as there is an element of illiteracy in all modern countries. There are some who think that the number of our fellow-citizens who can sign their names ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything in the bank to sign it for, but I am not ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Line of Educational Activity: Every genuinely democratic power must, in the domain of education, in a country where illiteracy and ignorance reign supreme, make its first aim the struggle against this darkness. It must acquire in the shortest time universal literacy, by organising a network of schools answering to the demands of modern pedagogics; ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... of the Nebraska schools from the kindergarten through the colleges and universities. It also made a fine display of the work of women's clubs in literary and musical lines. Throughout the exhibit the fact that Nebraska ranked first in small percentage of illiteracy was ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... More Schooling than American Farm Children No Illiteracy in the New Japan Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States Farming Without Horses or Oxen What the Japanese Farmers Raise The Crime of Soil-waste All Work Done by Hand Cooperative Credit Societies a Success Farm Houses Grouped in Villages ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... sales. Road construction is a top domestic priority. In the long term, Eritrea may benefit from the development of offshore oil, offshore fishing, and tourism. Eritrea's economic future depends on its ability to master fundamental social and economic problems, e.g., by reducing illiteracy, promoting job creation, expanding technical training, attracting foreign investment, and streamlining the bureaucracy. Eritrea's agriculture over the last two years was severely weakened by war and drought, and many ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... title our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. "The Moderate!" was a title assumed on the principle on which Marat denominated himself "l'Ami ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... safe for the next General Synod to go out there?" Let me tell your readers just two or three things about Kansas. Her educational exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair took the highest prize; her per cent of illiteracy is the lowest of all the States of the Union; her regiment, the 21st of Kansas, was the only regiment of the 65,000 men at Chickamauga Park during the late war with Spain in which every man could write his own name on the muster roll; and this same regiment voted unanimously not to have ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... product. With the fall of the empire, classical culture died out. The cathedral and cloister schools preserved the records of literature. The study of language, and the mental discrimination and refinement which spring from it and from literary discipline, passed away. Centuries of comparative illiteracy—dark centuries—followed. Yet the monks were often active in their own rude style of composition; and among them were not only good men, but men of eminent natural abilities, who were unconsciously paving the way for ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... ninety-four and very nearly one hundred per cent. When it is remembered that the Brahmans, who constitute only five per cent. of the total population, include seventeen per cent. of the literate class and more than twenty per cent. of those who know English, it can be understood that the illiteracy of the common people is still greater than that indicated ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... if any fund be dedicated to this purpose it may be wisely distributed in the different States according to the ratio of illiteracy, as by this means those localities which are most in need of such assistance will ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... do is to teach them, and make them realize that a knowledge of the English language is a prerequisite of first class American citizenship. * * * The wiping out of illiteracy is a foundation stone in building up a strong population, able and worthy to hold its own in the world. With the disappearance of illiteracy and of the ignorance of the language of the country will also disappear ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... from the bottom in the United States in illiteracy, and Jordan County ranks third from the bottom in this state! We have a public school system which lasts only five months in the year!' That was ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... in America every city, every town, every village, has its school; and it is no longer a class who have access to knowledge, for to the children of the poorest laborer the school-door stands open. From the civilized nations universal education is driving the dull host of illiteracy. ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... puts the flag there, but the serious recognition of the bed-rock principle of our Union: That we are all of one blood, one bounden duty; that all these anti-social prejudices are just as shameful as illiteracy, and that they must disappear as soon as ever we shall come to know each other well. Knowledge is power. That is true. And it is also true: A house ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... school boat is dissipated in sectarian religious education, not to say focussed on it, the arrival of the cargo must be seriously handicapped. The statistical returns may show a majority of our fishermen as "able to read and write"; but as a matter of fact the illiteracy and ignorance of North Newfoundland and Labrador is the greatest handicap in the lives of ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... election. Woman's Christian Temperance Union proves forty-seven varieties of corruption. South Dakota. Foreign vote defeated Woman Suffrage there. Figures of some counties. Relation between Prohibition and Woman Suffrage votes. West Virginia. Illiteracy and conservatism defeated Woman Suffrage there. Liquor influence felt. Corruption in Berkely County, West Virginia. Special Legislative session called but investigation of frauds abandoned. Analysis of vote of certain ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... interruptions and eruptions of illiteracy on our part. I think she rather enjoys them, as in the presence of such complete ignorance as ours her lamp of knowledge burns all ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Cape Cod, in 1778, and has become known, since then, as a place where skilful farmers and brave sailors could always be found. It also kept Maine supplied for years with oldest inhabitants. It is said that the name was an accident of illiteracy, and that it is the only place in the world that owes its title to bad spelling. The settlers who followed Atwood there were numerous enough to form a township after ten years, and the name they decided on for their commonwealth was Orangetown, so called for a village in Maryland ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... civil discord or perceptible evil results. The next is that in the states in which the township system did not prevail in fact as well as name, the public school system did not exist, or had only a nominal existence; and the proportion of illiteracy in those states as a consequence was, among the whites alone, something like four times as great as in those states in which the township system flourished. And this, too, notwithstanding almost the entire bulk of the ignorant ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... They are introducing, as far as they can, American efficiency among a lazy and undisciplined population. They are preparing to develop the natural resources of their country by the methods of State Socialism, for which, in Russia, there is much to be said. In the Army they are abolishing illiteracy, and if they had peace they would do great things for ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... style me; as, for Instance, where Aristotle is mentioned by Hector in Troilus and Cressida: and Galen, Cato, and Alexander the Great, in Coriolanus. These, in Mr. Pope's Opinion, are Blunders, which the Illiteracy of the first Publishers of his Works has father'd upon the Poet's Memory: it not being at all credible, that These could be the Errors of any Man who had the least Tincture of a School, or the least Conversation with such ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... of a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, was beyond all others well versed in the bewildering ways of the veldt. He apparently had no skill for the conducting of set battles, but for ambushing convoys, for capturing isolated detachments, for wrecking trains, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... of women was as inferior as their education, and the incredible depravity of morals was a sufficient answer to the oft-repeated fallacy that the purity of the family is best maintained by feminine seclusion. It is true there were exceptions to this reign of illiteracy. With the natural disposition to glorify the past, the writers of the next generation liked to refer to the golden era of the Valois and the brilliancy of its voluptuous court. Very likely they exaggerated a little the learning of Marguerite de Navarre, who was said to understand Latin, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... War time influence of D'Annunzio. Increasing cost of living. Secretarial courses. The most beautiful city of the American continent. Alfalfa. Women surgeons. The blimp. Democracy in Great Britain compared with that of the United States. The root of the Mexican problem. San Marino. Illiteracy in the ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... and other young relatives, during the approaching holidays, then of the needs of the poor of the neighborhood, and how to supply them; after that they talked of the claims of Home and Foreign Missions; the perils threatening their country from illiteracy, anarchy, heathenism, Mormonism, Popery, Infidelity, etc., not omitting the danger from vast wealth accumulating in the hands of individuals and corporations; also they spoke of the heavy ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... the reason why no books were found in his house, this is the reason why his solicitor, Thomas Greene, lived with him in his house at New Place (Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines, 1889, Vol. i, p. 226);—a well-known fact that very much puzzles those who do not realize the depth of Shakspeare's illiteracy. ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... illiteracy and puts a limited amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to have a beneficial ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... life that lies too deep for any mere change of environment to touch. Sammy remembered a lesson the shepherd had given her: gentle spirit may express itself in the rude words of illiteracy; it is not therefore rude. Ruffianism may speak the language of learning or religion; it is ruffianism still. Strength may wear the garb of weakness, and still be strong; and a weakling may carry the weapons of strength, but fight ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... receive in exchange for his production of food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather more than he did before the war. But he has no matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages the most frequent excuse for keeping children from school is a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as I have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove, without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go and learn to read and write. ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... so well; that he was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the 'wild West.' Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure, decided to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... later dictionaries after 1660; whether this was owing to the fact that the less-knowing women had now come upsides with the more-knowing men; or that with the Restoration, female education went out of fashion, and women sank back again into elegant illiteracy, I leave to the historian to discover; I only, as a lexicographer, record the fact that from the Restoration the dictionaries are silent about the education of women, till we pass the Revolution settlement and reach the Age of Queen Anne, when J.K. in 1702 ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray |
